1) Shared a lot of this with Lawr privately already, inspiring this post.
2) Peter’s derisive (found that on thesaurus.com) comments about Fu Manchu have inspired a Fu-fest for me.
3) Ran some errands on a beautiful Friday late afternoon/evening yesterday and was cranking King Of The Road loud. (In my 2009 Nissan Cube.)
4) For a rock ‘n’ roll site (well, supposedly anyway), the term “riff” is not used nearly enough.
5) Beach Boys be damned.
She’s one of the greatest of gospel voices, and this band slow burns, careful to let Shirley deliver.
I initially titled this post More Japanese Group Sounds of the Sixties, but these bands were not Group Sounds bands. Too weird, too individual for that.
You have to think the Mops have heard the Monkees.
Yuya Uchida & The Flowers moved toward the psychedelic and darkness. Uchida was friends with John Lennon.
Boogie on, from the Apryl Fool.
Stumbled on this stuff this morning, via this site.
Not surprising, there was a vibrant Japanese beat music scene in the 1960s, called Group Sounds, which borrowed from the harmonies and sounds of the British Invasion and psychedelica and turned them into something else.
Too soon to curate, too good to wait.
Lind and the Linders
The Toys
The Jacks
I have the UK version of this just about perfect pop song, so perfect it reached No. 56 on the Billboard charts, down in the basement. It has the little hole, not the big one US 45s have, and a picture sleeve. A reminder that the first punk explosion was followed by a wave of jangly power pop. Or maybe they were happening at the same time. Starry Eyes landed in 1978. It was the Records’ only hit as a band. They did contribute a hit to the Searchers’ 1979 comeback.
Was driving home from the Jersey Shore yesterday afternoon. No baseball games on mlb. No CDs in the car. Had to resort to Jango, the Pandora-thing I use, when forced. (Hadn’t signed in for months.)
I use Jango because it seems at least a little bit better than Pandora.
I hate all of these because:
1) I much, much, much prefer the comfortable continuity of an entire CD. Like I’ve mentioned before, where I come from, singles were for babies and albums were for grown-ups. I rarely want to be labeled a grown-up, but in this case I’ll take it.
2) The catalog of an artist consists of about two albums and five songs. Neither the Jango nor Pandora catalog contains Dudes or Ass Cobra on my “Turbonegro Radio.” That’s like having a baseball catalog without Babe Ruth and Ty Cobb.
3) Their suggestions suck. They don’t get what I like.
4) They give me suggestions at the expense of the artists I include to be played. Sometimes they’ll give me two songs by a suggestion band before playing even one from what I told them to play. Can’t there be a “just play what I told you because your suggestions suck” setting?
5) Their independent bands are godawful. I haven’t been in any great independent bands, but I can assure you that every independent band I’ve been in has been better than every independent band I’ve heard on these music services.
But I did get one good suggestion song yesterday, not that I hadn’t heard it before. The Swedish Hives are friends with the Swedish Hellacopters and you can see why. And they have a “tick tock” drummer too.
(The most assinine derogatory term I’ve heard in ages. Drummers are supposed to keep time, by the way. Sometimes they even use devices called “met-ro-nomes” to help them keep time even better. But Keith Moon is “innovative” – constantly pitter-patting all over the drums, sapping the power from music that could really use a power boost. For heaven’s sake, his own guitarist wished for a real drummer. Perhaps guitarists should loosen all their strings and just wank away. That would be “innovative.” It would also “suck.”)
Let’s steer this ship back to rock ‘n’ roll with The Hives:
My great aunt died and my mother said we, as a family, could decide how to spend the small inheritance.
My recollection is that Lee Michaels convinced me that the money should be spent on a Hammond B3. In terms of musical enrichment, that’s a no brainer. But my mom decided we’d do better with a pool table, and my geometry skills improved, for sure. Maybe my brother’s did as well.
I’ve always liked this Stevie Wonder song. I like Petra Hayden. And I kinda like Bill Frisell’s guitar playing.
For those expecting Fu Manchu, go home, but Frisell is a guy who straddles the jazz world and some other world, which is not the one of hammered chords. But as this cover shows, he’s down with reverb and looping and extending his strings as far as he can. And it all sounds good, usually without sounding pretty.
I’ve seen him live a few times, twice with the great now-deceased drummer and composer Paul Motian and the great tenor sax player Joe Lovano at the Village Vanguard. I wish he got dirty more, at least sometimes, but on the other hand, that’s so old.
For breakfast lovely harmonies and harmonics rule!
Stevie Wonder was making sounds when this came out that no one had heard before.
Lawr’s impassioned defense of the Who Sell Out, an album that has fantastic highlights, but also shows the unsightly spread of Pete Townsend’s ambition to warp the pop machine to large scale narrative. In any case, there are many great moments in Sell Out, and one of the most delightful and out of left field is the album’s inspiration of the singer Petra Haden to cover its entirety in multitracked vocals, she singing all the parts.
Perhaps if Keith Moon was more of a tick-tock machine this would come across as deracinated, but I imagine a young woman creating these complex arrangements, using her voice to mimic the whole of the sounds, in the dark night of her idea, realizing just how crazy the whole thing was. And then she pushes the record button and sings again. There are more tracks to be laid down.
